In the wake of the devastating images and news coming out of Japan recently, I doubt anyone needs to be reminded that disaster can strike at any time. Unlike most people, I didn’t have to wait for earthquakes and tsunamis to raise my disaster awareness this month. A couple of weeks ago, a major snowstorm […]
The Not-So-Simple Life column
The Not-So-Simple Life: Turning Mountains Into Molehills
Do you have your electricity bills from 15 years ago? You don’t? No, of course you don’t. Why would you? The more appropriate question, though, is probably: “Why would I?” Because up until a week ago, I did. As a matter of fact, it turns out I probably had most of my electric bills from […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: The Liberating Loosening of Losing Loose Ends
I need to address something right off the bat, because it’ll be bugging me this whole time if we don’t talk it over. I’m something of a word nerd. A word nerd, a spelling aficionado, and an editor. And in this modern age, my fellow word nerd brethren and I (if I can speak for […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: An Accountability Festival!
Last year as I wrote this column, I became increasingly aware that I was repeating many of my old patterns. When I revealed my age-old list of value resolutions and re-graded myself on it, one cluster of resolutions stood out as the most unresolved. That would be the grouping centered around time management and productivity. […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: Mind Mapping 2011
I’ve made reference to mind maps more than once in these pages, but until now, I haven’t really gotten into much detail about what they are and how they work. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, I assume you have access to Google and Wikipedia just like I do, and a […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: The Night Before Perfect
‘Twas the night before Perfect, and all through the house Not a creature was stirring—spiders all shooed out; This night had been looming since I was but a lad, I knew that come midnight, Peace of Mind would be had! The dogs had sprawled out on my bed, per the norm, And the cats had […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: Flashback: Shutting It All Down
The year was 2003. I was very busy. Like burnout busy. For starters, I was community manager and sole tech support provider for an online discussion community with 5,000+ members. I was chair of a local political party, with a focus on coalition-building and reaching out to new people. I made semi-regular appearances on local […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: Walking It Off
There are a lot of activities that a modern man or woman can do to try and escape the stress and pressures that mount in any given day. There is meditation. There’s sports. There is yoga, and various spiritual practices; there is religion and prayer; there’s various handiwork, like knitting or carpentry… I don’t do […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: My Life as a TV Network
In my last column, we witnessed me enjoying an in-column epiphany about my strengths in terms of scheduling and organizing. In said epiphany, I determined that my strongest and most dedicated exhibition of consistent action toward a goal has been my life-long history of watching TV shows that I like. And I mused about how […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: The Fear of Sunshine and Gold
The phrase “bane of my existence” probably gets used too broadly a lot of times, and definitely so by me, but there is something which is truly the bane of my existence: procrastination. Not that I have any idea what a “bane” exactly is, but I’m pretty sure it’s a bad thing. It always sounded […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: To Do List or Not To Do List? That’s Not the Question.
My quest to find the perfect to-do list has been long, and it has been varied. And it has been very unsuccessful. In the nearly 20 years since I first started compiling a list of big-picture things I’d like to accomplish, I have tried many, many, many methods for breaking down that big picture list […]
The Not-So-Simple Life: All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned from a Degenerate 22-Year-Old
They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions…but what they don’t tell you is that the road continues on. That’s right: if you stay on the road long enough, you pass through Hell and come out the other side. That’s been my experience, at least. During dark and weak times, intention—or “will”, […]